[Arthur Weston]

I have a Mont Blanc and it works magic!

 

[Arthur Weston]

The Mont Blanc opened the door to a world of curiosity about what is possible with bigger amps.

 

[6Channel]

I have a Mont Blanc and it works magic!

Some kind of magic, indeed: I plied the CanJams in LA, SF, and Denver for a year auditioning amps for my thirsty and revealing 600Ω Beyers, and the diminutive Mont Blanc consistently came up a winner. My "replacement" A3 carries the spirit, but is a bit too polite in response and comes up short of the E12's dynamics (power). The audiophile rags harp about the big rigs' specs and ability to drive some of the hungriest planars, but the geeks at FiiO seem to have demonstrated a peculiar knack for wringing great performance out of some pretty simple semiconductors.

I have to confess that I can't comment on all the DAC/amps on the market now, many of which are surely superb, because I can't feed them digital data - pure amps are literally disappearing by the week.

 

[sparrow95]

OK, stakarVN - I broke the code Wednesday: all the images online of the battery wires show a single hard-soldered red and black wires - mine, like yours, has two thin black + two thin red terminated in a connector, which was introduced in later production. I dragged out my "needle" probes and determined that the two black are actually parallel - acting as s single conductor; same for red. In 3 exchanges with FiiO in the past week, I'm pretty certain that the battery (mine is now ZERO volts) is, indeed, probably an 11.1V. I'm convinced that dimensions & packaging won't permit 3 3.7 pancake cells stuffed in the E12 chamber, which ostensibly could be connected in series. So, since my E12 worked just fine until the battery failed, I'm gonna string 3 18650's in series and feed it into the case through a grommet. This won't work well for portability, but mine just sits next to my easy chair. In hindsight, I'm surprised they even fooled around with the "serviceable" connector, as difficult as it is to find a replacement battery & just access the battery itself.

Completely incidentally, my crawls through message boards on chips (wish I had the DIY E12!) indicates that the working voltages for chips run across a fairly broad range, so the ol' E12 circuit might still crank out sufficient sound levels for some with a lonely 3.7 pancake: I'll be checking that out in the next coupla weeks, too. Unfortunately, my 600Ω cans really need the 11.1V juice.

My E12's battery died so i kept using it plugged in for months now, it worked fine but occasionally outputs a loud noise when powered on right after plugging the power cable, it would go away simply by waiting a few seconds post plugging the power cable before turning on.

Now after i noticed some overheating i took it apart and the battery was all swollen, removed it but then that same noise (that was present if turned on too fast after plugging the charger) is present permanently. i wonder if you know any trick how to adress this ? any help would be greatly appreciated (I'm planning to use it battery-less if possible just plugged into a charger at full time)

Putting some battery from aliexpress is a viable solution but while using it as a desktop amp it would just end up with the same problem over time